Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War. Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the island's burgeoning new manufacturing society. Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan's eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, "plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago."

Author Biography

Yang Mu was born and raised in Taiwan. He taught for many years at the University of Washington, Seattle, and National Donghua University in Hualien. He currently divides his time between Seattle and Hualien. He is the author of more than two dozen prose and poetry collections, including On the Water Margin, Flower Season, Lantern Boat, and Legends, as well as the experimental verse drama, Wu Feng: A Play in Four Acts. He recently received the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature. John Balcom teaches at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Recent publications include Li Rui's Trees Without Wind and Grass Roots: Selected Poems of Xiang Yang. He is a past president of the American Literary Translators Association. Yingtsih Balcom is a translator of Western and Chinese literature. She is a regular contributor to Taiwan Literature and has translated I. B. Singer's Shosha and coedited Indigenous Writers of Taiwan.